More Medicine! More Medicine!

Another shooting and another storm of hysterical outrage from all the usual suspects, resorting to all the usual rhetorical tricks and traps. "Yet another ...!", "How long Oh Lord....?" and "Give us more gun control! Give us more gun control!"

What I find contemptible is that the facts of the case are barely known and yet the cry goes up for more gun control. Don't we at least need a diagnosis based on facts before we know what medicine to prescribe? Or will any medicine do so long as it is in a big enough dose?

What is known as of this writing is that the assailant, a 28 year old woman, was armed with two "assault style rifles" and a handgun, or so it is reported. It is important to the copy writers at the New York Times to work in assault style rifles in some manner; but were they actually used to do the shooting?

Has anyone paused their scribbling long enough to ask how in hell one walks about with two rifles and a pistol? It seems rather cumbersome to me and leads directly to the question of: how was what handled when?

Was the woman actually carrying all three weapons? Often in these reports the word "armed" is used to describe the fact that guns were located in the trunk of a car or some such. So, was she armed in this (misleading) sense or was she actually carrying?

My suspicion is that the shooting was done with the pistol which was probably a semi-automatic. But I don't know and I can't draw any conclusions about anything until I do know.

What I do know is that the facts are irrelevant to the usual suspects. The anti-gun hysterics are shedding crocodile tears and pumping "yet another shooting" of innocent children for all it is worth in their crusade to nullify the Second Amendment.

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Throwing Tulips at Tigers

(or the Right to a Return on one's Labor)

This week Senator Sanders crossed examined Norfolk R.R. CEO, Alan Shaw about future company policies in the wake of the East Palestine disaster. Sanders asked: (1) if the company would commit to ending so-called "precision scheduling" which involved laying off 40,000 railroad workers as a result of which safety standards had plumeted; (2) if the company would commit to giving all of its workers paid sick leave in line with the rest of the country; and (3) if the company would commit to paying "all" of East Palestine's health care needs resulting from the accident.

To each of the questions, Shaw begged off with some evasive burble which, said Sanders, made him "sound like a politician."

"With all due respect" Bernie sounded like a dog barking up the wrong tree.

This issue was settled a century ago, when Henry Ford wanted to "plow back" company profits into building more factories and employing more people instead of paying dividends to shareholders. The shareholders filed suit, demanding their dividends. In Dodge v. Ford Motor Company, 204 Mich. 459, 170 N.W. 668 (Mich. 1919), the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that Ford's desire to use profits for some social and economic benefit took a back seat to the stockholders' right to those profits. In other words; the business of America is profit. No Shakespeare here.

The court's ruling became America's law which is founded on the principle that officers of a corporation owe a "fiduciary duty" to the stockholders. After all when someone lends you something you have a duty to do your best to return it in as good or better condition than when you got it. Company officers have a duty to use the money with which they have been entrusted wisely and for the benefit of the the investors. As a result the profit that money generates also belongs to the investors.

Bernie certainly knew or should have known, that the Prime Directive binding Shaw was his fiduciary duty to the company's shareholders. As such he could not possibly commit to doing anything that would prima facie detract from this shareholders' profits.

It may be that in the course of business a CEO or manager must, as a result of some necessity, undertake measures which diminish profits; but that does not equate to making a commitment to do so out of the blue and in the abstract. If Shaw had answered "yes" to any of Bernie's question he would be committing himself to malfeasance of office. Surely Bernie understood this.

It almost made one feel sorry for Shaw. It certainly made me feel sympathy towards Lenin.

Lenin hated social democrats. Why? Because underlying social democracy is a Fatal Compromise -- one which accepts the capitalist engine while hoping to make it run, not just more efficiently, but more fairly. However, the business of America is not "fairness" but business. We don't ask tigers to become vegetarians. Why should we expect a thing (in this case "capitalism") to be other than what it is. Bernie's questions to Shaw were like God asking the Devil if he promises to be good.

When Social Democrats promised to be good Germans, Lenin was furious. In a curiously prophetic phrase, he denounced them as "social chauvinists" who -- he said -- would in the end march off gloriously to war for the sake of German Big Business. In Lenin's view, there could be no compromises. Either one supported the system economically, politically and geo-politically or one did not.

To be fair, intellectual purity is the enemy of practical good. Even Marx understood that it was hard and sort of unfeeling to chastise social democrats for negotiating an eight hour day, safer working conditions, sick leave and pensions -- in short for negotiating for capitalist-conferred benefits. These do help people and that is nothing trivial, especially if you are one of the people needing help.

But one should not forget that they are capitalist conferred. They are not just "benefits" but benefits provided by a system in antagonism with itself.

This was the meaning of Reagan's joke about "Hello, I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help." Reagan and Thatcher were keenly aware of the inherent antagonism. They promised to do away with it. They did do away with 90% of it and le voila. Half the country lives in working poverty, without "benefits," owning 3% of the total wealth, while the upper ten percent own 70% of all wealth.

Yes for a while the tiger will behave, but he never ceases to be a wild animal and at any point the wildness can erupt, as it did in Norfolk's "precision scheduling" program and as it did, just the other day, in a Republocum's proposal to do away with laws against child labor.

Personally, I do not trust in absolutist solutions. Things always work better when they are a little bit fudged... like the "well tempered" musical scale. Perfection is grating on all things natural.

But one cannot walk down the road obliviously, the way liberals do, expecting tulips to fall from the sky, which is precisely the performance Bernie put on at the hearing.

What was needed was not a "commitment" from the tiger to do other than what tigers do. What was and is needed are binding laws that will force the tiger to behave with restraint. In theory, fascists actually understood this.

The principle of Dodge v. Ford Motor Company, needs to be uprooted and repudiated. For good measure, the opinion should be burned in public squares around the nation.

The Book of Genesis makes no mention of corporations. Corporations are not individuals with god-given rights to property. They are creatures of the State and it is the state which can create them to work as the State wants them to work with such immunities, rights and duties as the state shall grant and impose. This has apparently been forgotten in the United States and certainly in the murky well of the Senate

It is simply a no brainer, that if the State wants to it can impose limits on returns and dividends. It can require corporations to limit their financial growth in order to promote the public good. It can restrict what they do and how they do it. It can require them, for the sake of the workers and, by extension, for the sake of a happy society in which all have a purpose and place, to fork over money for safe working conditions, health care, pensions and so on. It is this principle that made France, Germany and the Nordic countries so successful both as societies and as "economic engines."

The United States also understood this from about 1945 to 1970, at which point capitalism's savage wildness began to reassert itself.

The principle of "imposing" socio-economic duties on corporations is hardly untoward or unnatural. The canard underlying so-called "fiduciary" duty is a dodge that assumes, without questioning, that the profits a corporation earns  is "its" own money.

Say an investor invests $10.00 in a company, as a result of which he owns 10 shares at a dollar a share. Let us suppose that all of that money is used to produce better mousetraps as a result of which, all costs deducted, the company earns takes in $100.00. Suppose that the company has a total of five investors and (to make it simple) each of whom bought 10 shares. A total of $50.00 went in and a total of $100.00 returned. Each investor as doubled his investment.

But by what slight of hand is it said that the $50.00 in extra inflows "is" the investor's money? If we were to mark the bills with initials, $50.00 of the $100.00 woulds be initialed "A," "B," "C," "D," and "E". THAT money which was invested, which went out in costs, and which came back a part of returns, could properly and rightly be called "the investor's money."

But the other $50.00 was not the "investor's" money. That's the whole point. If it were the investor's money then the investor would have gained nothing. He would simply have gotten back all that he put in. But the whole point of the exercise is to get back more than you put it.

So whose money is the additional $50.00. The Capitalist says: "It is obviously mine." Why? Because without the "trigger" of $50.00 invested there would no "return" at all. This is absolutely true. There is no pregnancy without an egg.

But the worker says: The additional $50.00 is obviously mine because without my work there would also be no "return." If the reader has jumped ahead; yes, there is also no pregnancy without a fuck.

Operating within the capitalist system both are right. But since both are right, both have a just claim to the company's profits. Our law, disgracefully only recognizes one party's rights. This is a grotesque violation of Equality Under Law.

Instead begging for commitments, Sanders should introduce and Congress should pass, legislation which recognizes the workers right to a "return on his labour" and the company's fiduciary duty to its workers as well as its stockholders. Anything less is throwing tulips at tigers.


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Washington's Latest Fad: Spurious Outrage & the Subversion of Justice

The Upper Crusti of the country are in over-drive that Tucker Carlson should have "selectively" released, hitherto suppressed, security video footage showing the peaceable nature of the January 6th insurrectionists once inside the Capitol. Rather than address the issue of why such material evidence should have been kept from Peelousy's supposedly full and fair hearing on the so-called "insurrection," Democratic sound boxes in office and in the media have taken to excoriating the messenger.

Leading the charge was none other than Senawhore Shuck Schumer who vented a pastiche of insinuation and invective blended with indignation and outrage. One gets caught up in this stuff like being overwhelmed by a wave that tosses you up over and around. One was helpless in the spin of Schumer's words. All one can do is shake the water out of one's ears when the overwhelming is over.

It is as pointless to parse such demagoguery as it would be to try to trace the paths of particular molecules of water in a tidlewave. The vile thing about sophistry is that it takes one page of analysis to deconstruct two sentences of bullshit. By the time one is finished everyone has collapsed either out of exhaustion or boredom and the demagogue walks away with his prize. This is why the average Joe simply knocks their teeth out, provided he can close enough.

We leave Schumer to is self-satisfied smirking and salivating. Just wipe away the slime and throw the rag out.

What was surprising was to see Republoscum united with Demorats on the issue, especially in view of the fact that they have sat sullenly on the side-lines while the Pelosicrats carried on with their witchhunt instead of dealing with the nation's business (except of couse to fork billions over to some corrupt, bankrupt country in Eastern Europe).

The reason for the suddens show of unity is that they are all of them measily, mice. Behind all the pompous grandstanding, they are cowardly (and incredibly stupid) midgets, bereft of new ideas and cravenly subservient to their dildo-weilding donors.

They were all terrified for themselves on January 6th, crouching under their desks, and so they take after Tucker Carlson for showing footage Viking Warrior being quietly escorted from room to room by Capitol Hill cops.

Let's be clear. Whenever a large crowd is gathered to protest something there is a potential for violence. Grievance and anger are in the air and a spark can always set things off. There were in fact acts of violence on January 6th, mostly by some of the protestors. But the Capitol is a large edifice, and violence was not everywhere.

What the suppressed footage showed was that for the most part the protest outside and into the Capitol itself was surprisingly peaceful.

In this regard, one also has to differentiate between a threat, danger or potential -- all of which refer to something that might or could happen but did not and actual conduct which did. No senawhore or congressoid was actually accosted and threatened. Whether they would have been, whether there was an intent to do that, is a matter of opinion but an opinion that has to be based on all of the footage not portions selected to buttress a chosen conclusion. Tucker is entirely right on this point. What is revolting is that the Upper Crusti don't see it.

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 What is even more revolting is that the prosecutors of Shaman Man suppressed -- I repeat -- suppressed exculpatory information. This is, and has for decades been, a MAJOR constitutional infringement, known as a Brady Violation, Under Brady v. Maryland (1963) 373 U.S. 83, 86-88, it is a prima facie violation of Due Process for the prosecution to suppress any evidence or information that is of material benefit to the defence. "Material" means anything that could be exculpatory or of assistance to the defence, including but not limited to sentencing issues. Moreover, it is not for the prosecutor to decide what is or is not relevant. The prosecution's duty is to liberally apply the "materiality" standard. Irrespective of its good or bad faith, if it calls it wrong, then it pays the price which is dismissal of the case or nullification of the verdict.

Worse than they hypocrisy of midgets on the hill, was the subversion of justice in the halls of law. Shaman Man, deserves to have his conviction set aside and to be immediately released. Nor should it be taken for granted that the judge or prosecutor are immune for their misconduct.

Immunity serves an important function in the administration of justice. But it should not be regarded as an absolute. If rights aren't absolute, neither are immunities. The suppression of evidence showing Shaman Man being peacefully escorted into the Senate Chamber where he did nothing but emit a wolf-like howl was too persuasive of innocence not to have been discovered. That it wasn't rendedered his trial a vindictive, farce and fraud. Neither judge nor prosecutor as the case may be should be allowed not to swing from the hook.

All democracies must endure demagoguery but when the machinery of justice is used to persecute scapegoats for political ends that is tyranny.

Those who participated in this hunt and those who knowing better stood by and let it happen have forever sullied themselves.

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Mexico: A Case Study in Gun Control

About 20 years ago, I took a trip to Mexico. I arrived as scheduled and took a cab to the house where I would be staying. The house was located in a very upscale neighbour-hood of Mexico City -- the sort of place where there is no commercial hustle and bustle and where stately houses sit behind gates and walls. No one answered the door.

WTF? After ringing and waiting, I began to think that perhaps we had gotten my time of arrival mixed up. For some reason, I had packed my watch, and so I sat on my suitcase wondering what to do and what time it was. Yes... there was a time before cell phones.

As I sat, a young man in his early thirties came out of an adjacent residence and headed toward a parked car. He had a watch. So I got up, walked over toward him and in correct and flawless Spanish said, “Excuse me, señor, but you wouldn't happen to...”

He immediately snapped to. A look of fear and dread came over him and he quite literally ran to his car, open and slammed the door and drove away in an evident panic.

WTF? Mexico had always been a friendly and, most of all, a courteous place and in many ways it still is. This sort of reaction was inconceivable to me.

My hosts eventually arrived and I told them about this encounter ending with, “...and as you can see, I was dressed neatly” in loafers, slacks and Brooks Brothers shirt.... “Ah well,” my host replied, “that was probably what set him off...”

WTF? As it turns out, Mexico was experiencing a “epidemic” of kidnappings. The standard modus operandi was for a neatly dressed gentleman to politely approach and take you off-guard, at which point accomplices would emerge from nowhere and hustle you into a waiting car. Then the call...

Kidnappings have gotten so ubiquitous that there are now professional “kidnap brokers,” sitting behind shiny desks in fancy offices, whose job (for a fee) is to negotiate the ransom with or without the interference of the police as the case may be. Sometimes the negotiations work; sometimes the don't.

Mexico has strict gun control. You can possess certain firearms in your home or designated places, but they must be registered and licensed. As many American tourists have discovered to their grief, failure to comply can lead to a five year prison sentence. “As with much of the rest of Mexican law enforcement, corruption is a major element of the gun licensing system.”

I have always laughed at how gringos misconceive of Mexico and how they confuse politeness and reserve with lack of ingenuity or initiative. The difficulty to legitimately acquire firearms has led to a gun-rental business through which criminals can rent the guns they need for the occasion.

Of course, the bigger criminals are themselves the gun cartels...

Gun control, clearly works, right?

But! But! But! the gun control fetishists will reply, look at Denmark, Norway and Sweden. They have gun controls and they are perfect societies! Precisely. They are perfect societies but not because they have gun control.

As usual American liberals got it inside out and upside down. If gun control works in European countries, it is only because those societies have already achieved a certain level of social justice and economic security which are the cornerstones of a sense of community which in turn is the actual precondition for law and order. American Republicans likewise got it backwards in thinking that “law and order” gives rise to a sense of community. Nope.

All one has to do is compare Mexico to Sweden. Mexico far outpaces Sweden in cultural and economic vitality and in gross-domestic product. It is currently the 15th strongest economy in the world, at least 15 places ahead of Sweden. But for all that, Mexico suffers a very high level of economic disparity. Per capita GDP in Sweden is 60K a year; in Mexico, 10K. In other words, Mexico suffers from acute income disparity; Sweden does not.

Income disparity is not the only indicator of everything. But one has to be an idiot not to know, at this point, that crime and poverty are handmaidens. It's really very simple. The word “community” derives from “com” + muneris, meaning mutual service or obligation. In other words, a society in which all look out for each, and each owes a responsibility to the whole. When community is lacking, “self-help” of necessity prevails.

Mexico has a crime problem because it has an economic disparity problem. The same is true in the United States, despite the fact that it is still the wealthiest country in the world. In fact its tremendous wealth actually distorts the significance of the figures. Per capita income of GDP in the United States in 70K a year, but for 50% of the country it is under 50K. The individualized median income is 30K. In other words, in terms of income distribution, the United States is more like Mexico than Sweden.

There was a time, back in the Fifties and Sixties, when the United States was more like Sweden; but our political and financial elites, Demorat and Republoscum alike, intentionally decided to Mexicanize the country back in the late 70's and 80's. To put it simply: the gig economy (scrambling for scraps) is the diametric opposite of community; and, as I have said, without community there is no cohesion and hence more crime.

I have little patience with Republicans and their inane and outdated Smithian yap about free markets, rising tides and trickle-down. Trust me; it is dead on arrival. All economics has always been the result of intervention. The issue is the kind of intervention we want. When I listen to Republicans blabbering about “too many dollars chasing too few goods” I have to wonder if they are really that stupid or if they are just whores to the corporations unilaterally raising prices because they can get away with it.

But I have even less patience with liberals, who have avoided underlying issues in their own inimitable and equally inane way. Has anyone ever noticed how liberals are always chasing after some issue -- the race issue, the women issue, the disability issue, the gay issue, the trans issue, the gun-safety issue... ANYTHING but the 401(k) issue...

Liberals are culled from the upper middle class; the “Ten Percent”. They instinctively know (that is, they know without knowing it) who and what butters their bread. Oh yes! Housing affordability is a crisis! Something must be done! And what might that be? Building more houses, so as to increase supply and hence lower prices? And then? What happens to your little “nest egg” of ever-appeciating real estate value? Some 30 something can't afford a house and your 60-something “nest egg” just doubled in value and you don't see the connection? Are you as stupid as Republicans?

This has been going on for decades. Back in the 60's Phil Ochs, composed a song, Love me! I'm a Liberal, which is as timely now as it was then. And so, ever in avoidance of the economic elephant in the room, the liberals are chasing after the next Issue-in-Avoidance. ... Gun control. If only we get rid of a symptom (“gun violence”) the cause will go away...

Well...politics is nothing if not rampant stupidities. One might as well demand that birds not chirp. But when the chirping starts to chip away and subvert the Bill of Rights, at that point I draw the line.

The right to keep and bear arms, is the second foundational principle of our society. It is at the essence of “what we are about” as a people. If liberals don't get it, they should go to an ashram, cross their legs and meditate on the Bill of Rights until they achieve Foundational Enlightenment.

The Mexican Constitution (1917) also guarantees the right to possess arms:

"The inhabitants of the United Mexican States have the right to possess arms in their homes for their security and legitimate defense with the exception of those prohibited by federal law and of those reserved for the exclusive use of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and National Guard. Federal law shall determine the cases, conditions and place in which the inhabitants may be authorized to bear arms."

Therein lies a fundamental difference. One that leaves you defenceless when a stranger approaches you to ask for the time....

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An Unasked Question

A year ago to the month, San Salvador's president, Nayib Bukele, began a mass roundup of gang members. Within months, the government had detained about 40,000 members of the Mara-Salvatrucha and M-18 gangs, who were jammed like human sardines into the country's inadequate and delapidated jails, from where they conducted business as usual including blackmail, terrorist retaliations and murders.

Bukele's response was swift: he turned off the food. A howl of protest arose from various international human rights organizations. Bukele was ready for them as well: “And if the international community is worried about their little angels, they should come and bring them food, because I am not going to take budget money away from the schools to feed these terrorists.”

As if to underscore the point Bukele posted a video showing guards with billy clubs forcing inmates to walk, run and even descend stairs with their arms held behind their necks or backs. The inmates were stripped to their underwear, and their mattresses were taken away.

The San Salvadoran congress approved and extended the temporary state of emergency which included longer pre-hearing detentions, loosened procedural safeguards and the removal of unenthusiastic judges. The international NGO-Press was again in arms lamenting the perhaps 1,600 youths who had been mistakenly detained and some of whom got “lost” in the morass of cages that passes for a penitentiary system. It is a safe wager that Bukele's private response was that: you can't make an omelette without cracking some eggs.

By all accounts, except for legal perfectionists, the average San Salvadoran was enjoying the omelette. Make no mistake, these gangs are brutal. There is no other word for their behaviour. Their morality is an inversion of our own -- a negative universe where nightmares are sweet dreams.

Almost a year to the day, and Bukele has announced the opening of a new mega-prison in the middle of nowhere to house 40,000 inmates for sentences ranging from 25 to 40 years. To all intents and purposes, these gang members have been permanently extracted from civil society.

Well... what else is new? Using similar measures, Caesar “cleansed” the Mediterranean of pirates and the world was grateful to him for it.

Normally, inmates thus removed from society are inserted into an alternative society, such as Alcatraz, Devil's Island... Georgia... Australia... Life in such institutions and penal colonies is harsh both de jure and de facto, but it is a form of society nevertheless. In contrast, Bukele's Center for the Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT) is not any form of society at all. It is purely and very simply a human warehouse.

The entire complex is a surgically antisceptic. Bright, white, shiny, and devoid of any discernible character. The bright hangars in which prisoners are to be housed contain nothing at all except concrete, metal and artificial lighting.

I mean nothing. No common areas. No television. No tables. No chairs. There is no privacy at all. Everything is empty, open, and closed off. The cells, housing about 40 inmates each, consist of nothing except fixed metal racks stacked four high. They look exactly like the pallet racks in warehouses. No sheets, much less pillows or mattresses are provided. The inmates must sleep like animals on the sheer metal surface.

The inmates themselves are stripped of everything, except one pair of white scivvies and (of course) their shackles and hand-cuffs.

Some reports have stated that the “facility” has a gym and an outside exercise yards. It does, but these are for the staff. Another report showed a large dormitory area with mattress beds and lockers. But these too were for staff.

Other reports have shown what purports to be “shops” where inmates will be able to work; but these are patently for show. They were not big enough to occupy 40,000 slaves; nor did they contain much of any visible machinery for anything.

No. The plan is to keep 40,000 human beings in a state of mere existence. Even the metal grating has been designed as a species of razor sharp wire, making it impossible to hang or swing therefrom. What is planned is a form of mass solitary confinement.

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For those who act up, or go crazy, there are dark solitary confinement cells consisting of six walls of concrete and one heavy iron door. The aptly named minister of the interior brags that those so confined will not see any light at all. Bright hole, black hole take your pick.

None of the reports we have read made any passing mention of counselling, rehabilitation, remedial programs, religious services... nothing.

At some point, the government may decide that a docile work force of 40,000 is too profitable a thing to waste and will invite some German company to set up shop in a camp annex. But, as of the moment, the prison consists of nothing except housing cells, punishment cells and (supposedly) some sort of slop-preparation facility.

Thus, in addition to being deprived of all clothes and all amenities, the prisoners will be deprived of all purpose and all hope. In this excrutiatingly antisceptic void, the inmates will no doubt start to canabilize themselves at which point they will be dragged into dark holes or beaten and tear gassed into quiesence until life itself becomes mere listless stupefaction.

Bukele has evidently decided that gangs are a civil cancer and CECOT is the chemotherapy, one short step away from disinfecting gasses.

The amazing thing is how compliant the prisoners already are. A year ago, they were carrying on in the usual boisterous and violent manner. Today, a relative small handful of guards control 500 or 1000 men, who always keep their shaved heads bowed, who bow at the waist when they walk or run to a designated destination and who sit quietly on the floor, dick-to-asshole, without a murmur.

  
What turned thousands of hardened, brutal, tough criminals into docile cows? It cannot have been beatings. These men are tough and thrive on physical violence. Moreover none of them looked physically damaged. No one has asked this question.

My guess (and it is only a guess) is that they were starved into submission. “Any one acts up and no one eats for a week” is a mighty effective inducement.

The brutality of the gangs was (and is) appalling. Equally appalling, though, is the government's response. From Supermax prisons in Colorado, to Metropolitan Detention centers in LA and NYC and now to gang warehouses in San Salvador, we have perfected the art of anodyne torture and dehumanization. The dystopia of the New American Century is bright, light and empty space inhabited by carbon-based objects.

I have very little confidence in rehabilitative programs. Aside from the Nordic and Germanic countries, prisons only make criminals worse.

The reason for this is that most prison regimes are based on retribution: making the criminal suffer for the crime he has committed. If beating an animal or chaining it to a post does not make it more social, it is a mystery to me why people would expect locking a man in a cage to produce any better results.

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It seems to me that the only way to undo the defect and the hurt that underlies most anti-social behaviour is to give criminals the respect, love, security, encouragement they were denied as children. In other words, to throw roses at pigs.

Obviously most people gag at “love your criminal” notwithstanding that on Sundays they promise to love their enemies.

Be that as it may, Bukele's inmates are not merely pigs but wild and savage boars. One can only imagine what deprivation and violence turned once soft and helpless babies into such cruel and hardened lovers of all things dark. And it's not just the “turning into” but also the “training in.” What we have in gang memebers is a life that is the inverse of “justification” and “sanctification”

Having been turned into criminals, they are now too far down the road of habituated vice to be called back. Bukele's solution to this human ruination is to replace it with another type of ruination. While I am not the least bit indifferent to the pain and suffering these gang members callously and even happily inflicted on their many victims, I cannot but feel sorry for a creature who was doomed from the start of his life. I have to ask myself, what kind of god is it that throws so many human lives to waste.

Whatever God or Bukele want to do, I cannot but think that we cannot go down that road; that writing off people whom Fate herself had written off is not the decent thing to do. It creates in us, the good and the decent, an attitude that is all too amenable to inhumanity and evil... Once we loose our feeling of compassion, once we treat other living things as disposable objects we become the greatest of Creation's monsters. Did not the 20th century teach us that not once but multiple times?

And so it is that I think that for our own sakes, we must play the fools and provide these inmates with some occasion to practice a positive form of community. If all Bukele is going to do is turn them into warehoused objects he might as well just gas em and be done with it.

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